The art world appears to have gone bananas, quite literally, marked by the sale of the exotic yellow fruit on November 20 at a Sotheby’s auction for over $6.2 million – a pretty steep price given reports that the banana had been bought earlier in the day for 35 cents. The perishable good taped to the wall by a piece of grey duct tape was described by buyer and crypto-entrepreneur Jason Sun as “a cultural phenomenon,” one which he planned to eat later that day “honouring its place in both art history and popular culture.”
The artwork (if it can be called that) by Maurizio Cattelan takes the name of Comedian and was first seen at Miami Beach’s Art Basel, an international, private art fair, where three versions were sold for $120,000-150,000 each. Its debut provoking intense commotion, the piece was defaced through consumption by performance artist David Datuna, who later took to Instagram with a video of him peeling the banana with a cheeky grin. The caption reads “‘Hungry Artist’ […] I really love this installation[.] It’s very delicious.”
The statement released by Art Basel seemed not to take Datuna’s act in such good spirits: “The crowds surrounding the installation posed a serious health and safety risk, as well as an access issue, so the work was removed.”
Datuna’s act of comic resistance might have been as drastic and transformative as Adam and Eve’s consumption of the forbidden fruit if it had not been for Art Basel nullifying Datuna’s massacre of Comedian, through claims that the artwork is a concept. Accompanying the mid-afternoon snack is a certificate of authenticity – and it is this piece of paper which supposedly justifies its extortionate value.
After its most recent sale, Comedian has once again gone viral, an adjective which could also be used inversely to describe its contaminating toxicity in the contemporary art world. Responses to the work have skirted around one central question: should we be resisting or capitulating the commodification of art?
Sotheby’s seems to think neither of these – the auction-house in fact celebrates Cattelan’s achievements with Comedian. “No other artwork from the twenty-first century has provoked scandal, sparked imagination, and upended the very definition of contemporary art like Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian” writes Sotheby’s, glorifying the artist for how he has “single-handedly prompted the world to reconsider how we define art, and the value we seek in it.”
Sotheby’s praise however seems to hide its organisational discrepancies: “What bothers me is that after the first sale, the artist no longer profits as the work changes hands,” wrote Cattelan to the New York Times. “Auction houses and collectors reap the benefits, while the creator, who makes the very object driving the market, is left out.”
Cattelan’s transfiguration of the artist into “the creator” and art into an “object” seems to show the ways commodifying claws have dug into art, not only obliterating meaning but also stripping it of its humanity. Whilst he has emphasised that Comedian is “a sincere commentary and reflection on what we value,” Cattelan has also admitted he seeks to “play the system but by my own rules,” a statement which makes him more than complicit in capitalism’s prey on art.
Still, ambiguity remains over who or what this artistic reductionism can be attributed to. Is it artists like Cattelan, organisations like Sotheby’s or buyers like Sun? It seems to be all and none of this triad, something social and ideological in form yet dependent on endorsement by individuals whose greed manifests in a physically small but economically hefty appetite.
“Banana duct taped to fridge as a reminder to eat less meat” by Jane023 (talk) 12:28, 24 December 2019 (UTC) is marked with CC0 1.0.